Korean researchers working with Samsung Heavy Industries have cleared a key hurdle in their efforts to develop designs for a containership powered by molten salt nuclear reactors. The American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) granted basic design approval, an AiP, for the project, reports the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute.

The Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute is working jointly with the Korea Research Institute of Ships & Ocean Engineering and Samsung Heavy Industries on the design of a 15,000 TEU vessel with nuclear power.

The companies point to the safety and efficiency achieved through the use of molten salt. It combines nuclear fuel with the molten salt, which is a safety feature as it would harden if the reaction failed, encasing the nuclear material. //

The key feature of their concept is two Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) employing the molten salt technology. They point to a redundancy with the two reactors as well as a power system design to efficiently manage the reactors’ output against the ship’s power demands. They also incorporated a surplus power storage capability that could provide power when needed. //

ABS reviewed and verified the technical feasibility and safety of the technology and design. The receipt of the Approval in Principle (AiP), the group said, is a “confirmation of the potential of marine nuclear technology.”

In theory, a civilian power reactor could be used to provide weapons grade plutonium; but this is such a difficult and expensive route, that with almost no exceptions the current weapons states have elected to use special purpose reactors to do this.

The 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) recognized the problem; but, unlike current anti-proliferation activists, the NPT took a constructive attitude. The deal was simple: in return for full access to the wonders of nuclear power, you will forego making a bomb and allow our inspectors full access to all your nuclear facilities. Unfortunately, the weapons states, led by the USA, have violated the letter and spirit of this treaty over and over, and in process they have gutted the treaty and made it much more difficult for nuclear power to solve the Gordian Knot. We have turned Eisenhower's solemn pledge into a grotesque lie. Maybe we should take a look at the Non-Proliferation Treaty. //

In 1977, the Carter administration threatened to stop fuel shipments to any nation that undertook reprocessing.\cite{cohen-1990}[p 235-236] Hard to imagine a more flagrant violation of the NPT. Nor a more counter productive one. Overnight, countries that thought they had a treaty, which said they could rely on the US to be their nuclear fuel supplier, knew this was not the case. They now had a strong incentive to become self-sufficient.

Any country who is a signatory to the NPT should invoke her inalienable rights. Buy or build enrichment facilities. Recycle fuel if she wants. Just forego a nuclear weapons program and let the IAEA inspect whatever they want. This is not only her inalienable right, but the NPT shows that the USA and all the other signatories recognize that it is her inalienable right.

The bases for declaring the start of a “Golden Era of Nuclear Power” are a set of achievements that only a few could imagine just a year ago. After 50 years without starting any novel reactors in the United States, a handful of exciting new projects have achieved substantial completion. Those projects reached their current state just 14 months after President Trump issued an Executive Order with the audacious goal of achieving criticality for three new reactors by July 4, 2026. The Reactor Pilot Program (RPP) participants were announced just 10 months ago. //

Three new power and heat production reactors from three young ventures – Antares, Aalo and Deployable – have been constructed or installed at the Idaho National Laboratory. Antares’s Mark-0 successfully completed its initial startup, reaching criticality on June 1, becoming the INL’s 53 reactor. Aalo Atomics’s Critical Test Reactor and Deployable Energy’s Unity Nuclear Battery (UNB) are within days of achieving initial criticality. During the celebration, Sec. Wright gave a progress report on the imminent reactor startups: //

Though the celebration event was INL-centric, the speakers also mentioned additional activity that is underway in other locations. Two more reactors are at a similar development stage in Lockhart, TX (Oklo Isotopes’s Groves) and Orangeville, UT (Valar’s Ward 250). After starting operations on June 18, Valar increased the Ward 250’s power to its rated level of 100 kWt and also tested the system at its short term maximum power of 250 kWt. It is conducting a carefully planned sequence of operational and safety tests. Oklo Isotopes’s Groves is complete and close to starting up.

The leaders of the Radiant Nuclear’s Kaleidos DOME testing program chose to skip the race for early criticality in favor of assembling a more complete, full scale power plant. Radiant’s plan is to go critical and then promptly move to full power operations. The final reactor that is under construction at INL, Oklo’s Aurora-INL, is a significantly larger reactor – 75 MWe – that should be ready to operate in 2028. //

Three of the new reactors at INL took advantage of existing facilities and buildings, the other two at INL and the two outside INL are building new facilities from scratch. It has been a very long time since five new reactors were simultaneously under construction at INL. It’s possible that it has never happened before. //

As one senior official stated, he is happy that the new default attitude is to say “yes” or to find a way to the point where “yes” is the right answer.

That same senior official also noted that these new reactors represented a completely different paradigm from the one that produced the first 52 reactors built at Idaho National Laboratory. Instead of government funded, government directed and private company supported projects, all of the new ones are privately funded and privately directed with the support of laboratory experts and the oversight of the government officials at the Department of Energy.

People are always pestering me for concrete examples of the cost of NRC style regulation. I turn them off by telling them it doesn’t work that way. It’s about incentives and motivation. What are the sticks and what are the carrots? Suppose you tell a football player, your overriding priority is not getting hurt. If you get hurt or do anything that might get you hurt, you are out of football for life. Now go out there and win this game.

When you go from a competitive environment where it’s build better/cheaper or die to an environment which is ruled by an autocratic regulator’s goal to prevent a release, everything goes to hell. Paperwork and process trumps substance erecting massive barriers to entry. Cheap becomes “unsafe”.

Everybody’s motivation gets wrong headed, not just the regulators. Incumbents work harder on protecting and deepening their artificial paperwork moat than they do on their product. Workers forced to follow ridiculous, wasteful procedures and sit around waiting for a series of sign offs on an obvious fix rationally decide if the bosses don’t care about doing the job right neither should they. Fixed price contracts become infeasible. The vendors’ goal becomes milk each project for as much money as possible for as long as possible. And the next thing you know, plants take three or four times as long to build as they should and cost five or more times what they should.

My inquisitor walks away shaking his head and saying to himself, where are the facts, he doesn’t have a real argument. //

But an important factor is that getting rid of open racking is at least three times as expensive as it should be because of the paper work required to build a simple steel and concrete can.

In short, NRC style regulation is the reason every nuclear power plant in the US uses dense-packing, which is by far the most likely, non-weapons path to a Chernobyl or larger sized release in the USA. Such a release coupled with the NRC’s immoral, indefensible defense of LNT will cause panic, evacuation, and exile that will shake the country to its roots. Is that a big enough cost for you?

If you don’t pursue safety in a way that is cost effective, you are killing people. -- [David Okrent, Past chairman, Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards]

Suppose early in 1979, you asked yourself what is the most definitive experiment we could do to learn about the radioactive harm associated with a nuclear power plant release. The obvious answer: a big release would be that experiment. But you would immediately reject that idea on both ethical and economic grounds. Since then we’ve inadvertently run that experiment three times. Let’s look at the results. //

Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima //

So we did the definitive experiment. The result: even in a very large power plant release, dose rates to the public are almost never higher than the dose rates our bodies know how to handle. Nature had to equip us with those repair systems to cope with the onslaught of DNA damage from our internal metabolic processes, which damage our DNA at a rate that is at least 25,000 times higher than the damage rate from average background radiation.

Nuclear power plant casualties are extremely expensive economically, which means it’s in the operators’ interest to build robust plants and operate them prudently. But from a public, radiation point of view almost all releases will produce no detectable harm, and the very worst releases are no worse than a bad refinery fire at killing the public.

This puts nuclear in the same category as wind and solar, when it comes to directly killing people per TWh of electricity, and orders of magnitude less directly deadly than coal plants. But it’s the indirect deaths that really count. The easiest way to kill a lot of people is to make them poorer. With a few exceptions, wind and solar will do that. Nuclear will too unless it is as cheap as coal. Nuclear has been cheaper than coal, and can be cheaper again; but only if we regulate nuclear in a way that eliminates barriers to entry and forces the vendors to compete on an even playing field. Right now we are doing exactly the opposite. We are killing people.

The Rockefeller Foundation and its allies decided to argue that radiation produced genetic damage and that damage was unrepairable. Radiation damage just keeps building up. Therefore, the harm was proportional to the total dose, regardless of how rapidly or slowly that dose was incurred. This is like saying taking 365 tablets of aspirin at once is the same as taking 1 tablet per day for 365 days. This no repair hypothesis is called the Linear No Threshold model or LNT.

If LNT is correct, then the Banners could aggregate the tiny increases in dose rate due to test fallout over hemispherical populations and over decades to argue that Bomb testing was invisibly killing millions of people worldwide. The Foundation expertly (and unscrupulously) promoted LNT with all its resources.

"For the first time in more than four decades, a new privately developed non-light-water reactor has reached criticality in the United States. Thank you to President Trump for his bold leadership and thank you to the bold scientists and entrepreneurs at Antares and Idaho National Laboratory who helped make this moment possible. I look forward to seeing continued progress in the American nuclear renaissance." //

Hallen
10 hours ago
American nuclear spent decades going nowhere, buried under regulatory delays and cost overruns.
This is the most important sentence in the article. It's true.

America could have been running on clean, ultra safe, abundant, reliable nuclear power by now if it were not for the climate alarmists and people who loved the movie "The China Syndrome". The EPA and other agencies have made it so difficult, to the point of being almost impossible, to develop nuclear power that advances came at a snail's pace.

The climate alarmists and Democrat officials saw the huge potential for massive funding shifts that could be manipulated for both personal gain and to develop Democrat power bases in "sustainable" energy. What they deemed unilaterally to be solar and wind. In my opinion, they intentionally hamstrung both fossil fuel development and nuclear development.

Look at the cost now. All those data centers everyone are overreacting over would be a non-issue for power consumption issues if we had these reactors. (they really aren't a problem either way, but it wouldn't be a talking point either). Powering EVs wouldn't be a worry.

The left has caused this problem. Even a little win like this one seems huge because of it.

I hope this trend continues and we can see more of this.

The article also doesn't mention the type of reactor. It's very important.
It's a sodium heat-pipe-cooled advanced microreactor. It's cooling mechanism is self-contained and does not need external water supplies for cooling. It means it can be used on things like submarines and a spaceships. It's also going to be used to power military bases to keep them secure and off the civilian grid.

These types of reactors can also be used in clusters to power remote locations so they don't need to be connected to the grid. That means lower infrastructure costs and independence. It could drive development in remote, harsh areas where people could live if they could get power and water. These types of reactors could drive that kind of development which would be a huge benefit to housing costs.

The future could be that your home is way out in the desert with a grand view and few if any other homes visible from your location. You'd connect to the urban areas via high speed tunnels using your EV or even autonomous aircraft. Half an hour and you're in Phoenix or Denver or Boise or Reno. It could be pretty cool.

Sean Duffy’s MARAD initiative may look like another Trump-era energy dominance announcement, but beneath the politics lies a serious industrial question: can the United States build the regulatory, shipyard, insurance and port framework needed to make nuclear-powered merchant ships commercially viable before Asia takes the lead? //

The real story behind the announcement made by U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy and the Maritime Administration on 7 May is not that America has discovered nuclear propulsion. It is that Washington has finally recognized maritime nuclear power as a shipbuilding, logistics, insurance, port-access and national-security race, and has decided to enter it. MARAD’s Request for Information, with comments due by 5 August 2026, asks industry to help develop a U.S.-built, scalable, commercially viable SMR model for marine transportation. That is a materially different ambition from funding a reactor demonstration. It is an attempt to build a complete commercial ecosystem. //

Shipping is uniquely suited to nuclear propulsion. The energy density argument for maritime nuclear propulsion is more compelling than for almost any other transport sector. A modern ultra-large container ship consumes between 250 and 350 tonnes of fuel per day at sea. Over a 25-year operational life, fuel can represent billions of dollars in lifecycle cost. Bunker storage, fuel treatment systems, purifier rooms, sludge handling, emissions scrubbers and the growing infrastructure of alternative-fuel compliance consume enormous volumes of space, capital and crew time. Nuclear propulsion potentially eliminates most of that complexity, a reactor fuelled for two decades or more fits within a containment space that returns cargo volume to its owners and voyage economics to their prior simplicity. //

Thorium, increasingly discussed as an alternative fuel cycle, offers further advantages. Thorium-232 converts under neutron bombardment to fissile uranium-233, is three to four times more abundant than uranium in the earth’s crust, produces significantly less long-lived radioactive waste, and is far less susceptible to weapons proliferation. Molten salt reactor designs, which dissolve thorium in liquid fluoride salt that also acts as the coolant, operate at atmospheric pressure rather than under the high-pressure steam conditions of conventional light-water reactors, removing explosive decompression risk. An approval in principle for a nuclear-powered LNG carrier using molten salt technology was granted in 2025. //

The United States now accounts for approximately 0.1 per cent of global commercial ship production. A single Chinese state shipbuilder built more vessels by tonnage in 2024 than the entire U.S. industry has produced since 1945. //

The U.S. has become marginal in commercial construction outside naval programmes, which is precisely why the MARAD announcement repeatedly frames SMR development as a mechanism for rebuilding domestic yards, creating strategic engineering employment, and reconnecting maritime and defence industrial capacity. //

While Europe debates how to tax shipping emissions, the United States is beginning to ask who will build and power the next generation of ships altogether.

South Korea is not waiting for that question to be answered. HD Hyundai has unveiled a 15,000 TEU-class SMR-powered containership concept and is working with ABS on nuclear-electric propulsion systems potentially supplying up to 100 megawatts. China has explored molten salt reactor ship concepts and is investing heavily in thorium-based systems. Russia already operates the only nuclear-powered commercial vessels in service, alongside its Arctic icebreaker fleet.

A core part of the energy transition and of the solutions to meeting energy needs, nuclear energy is a strategic resource that is often a subject of debate. This section aims to respond to the main questions and misconceptions by presenting nuclear energy as clearly as possible. The goal is for everyone to form their own opinion.

The capacity of nuclear energy to ensure our energy independence and to guarantee the production of low-carbon electricity is invaluable for tackling the climate emergency.

1. A Low-carbon energy – Yes, it emits the least greenhouse gases!
2. Constant and controllable energy
3. Competitive energy – Least expensive!!
4. Energy that is essential to the electricity mix
5. Energy that is vital for tomorrow’s world
6. Energy that is sparing in its demand for raw materials – It saves natural resources!
7. Energy that preserves health – It does NOT emit fine particles, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrates or phosphates into the atmosphere!
   The plume escaping the reactors? Water vapor. That’s it.

Nuclear power is the most reliable and cleanest form of energy. //

Belgium has accepted reality and embraced nuclear power 20 years after passing phase-out legislation.

The Belgian government intends to acquire all of the “nuclear operations in the country” from the French energy group Engie.

“By doing so, the Belgian Government is taking responsibility for Belgium’s long-term energy future, with the objective of building a financially and economically viable activity that supports security of supply, climate objectives, industrial resilience and socio-economic prosperity,” Engie and the Belgian government said in a joint statement.

Belgium is reversing its decades long phasing-out course, seeking more energy independence by reviving its nuclear plants.

The Belgian government signed on Thursday a Letter of Intent to acquire Electrabel's (ENGIE) entire nuclear operations in the country.

Such a move would reverse the phase-out of nuclear energy legislation adopted in the early 2000s amid safety concerns.

Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever stated that the country is aiming to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels and gain greater autonomy in managing its own energy supplies.

I’m an engineer. That means I was put here to design and build things. The last thing I want to do is harp about a misguided regulatory system, which has turned a providential gift which should lift humanity to new heights into a drag on ratepayers and taxpayers and a haven for parasites and grifters. I need a break. A chorister has asked me if we could build a conventional big PWR in a shipyard. This would combine the low technical risk of a 75 year old technology with the amazing productivity of a world class shipyard. This question gives me a chance to go back to what I should be doing instead of moonlighting as an ineffective JV Jeremiah. //

But we are still below a 100 million dollars for steel and ballast. According to KHNP numbers, all the stuff inside the turbine hall will cost about 400 million. and the the Nuclear Steam Supply System will cost 1.5 billion.\cite{choi-2017} (Both numbers are far higher than they should be.) We are talking about 2 billion dollars for a 1.4 GW plant.

This is all back of the envelope. It will have to be confirmed by doing the actual design. But thanks to recent advances in heavy lift capability, if and only if we go to all steel construction, I’m confident that technically we could build a 1 GW+ Pressurized Water Reactor in a shipyard, and gain the astounding productivity that the world class yards have had to develop in the fiercely competitive environment that they face. We could quickly get back to $2000/kW and less using the same basic technology that the late 1960’s plants used. Build times will start out at around two years and quickly come down to one year. The TG will be the long lead time component.

But this is all dreaming. Shipyard productivity depends on three basics:

1) No one can unilaterally dictate the rules. Everybody involved knows the rules and the rules can’t change in the middle of the game.

2) Total freedom to build the ships the way the yard wants to and change that process as it sees fit, as long as the ships perform to spec. This includes freedom to buy equipment and material from anybody willing to provide it. And freedom to decide on its own quality enforcement system.

3) Intense competition over an extended period, not just between the yards, not just between the yards’ vendors and the vendors’ vendors, but also between the Classification Societies.

We have chosen to not allow these three basics to exist for nuclear power.

Until we build nuclear plants like the Koreans build commercial vessels, attempting to build plants, big or small, in a yard, will accomplish nothing but screw up the yard. Pass the Nuclear Reorganization Act.

Dr. Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, 90, an Apollo 17 astronaut who spent three days on the moon in 1972, told The Post this week that there is a superfuel locked within the lunar dust that could provide Earth with an abundance of clean and safe energy for generations.

“I’ve been working on this for many decades — harvesting the light isotope of helium-3 from the moon,” said Schmitt, who is from New Mexico and lives in Albuquerque.

Schmitt is one of just 12 humans to ever walk on the moon, and four who are still alive. Buzz Aldrin, Charlie Duke and David Scott are also all in their 90s.

Since his Apollo 17 commander, Gene Cernan, died in 2017, Schmidt has been the last man alive to step off the lunar surface.

He also stands out for another reason: Unlike the other Apollo astronauts, who came from the military, Schmitt was a geologist and the only trained scientist to make the historic trip. //

“The question is, will that momentum keep going forward?”

Schmitt says he believes it will through a viable business model for interlunar travel — fueled by an industry involving the reaping of helium-3.

Helium-3 is a key ingredient needed to run nuclear fusion reactors, which operate with extreme efficiency and without the dangerous radioactive waste today’s fission-based power plants create.

But helium-3 is extremely rare on Earth — so rare that it’s rationed by the federal government — meaning fusion reactors have never been viable on a large scale.

But the moon is believed to be ripe with it, since the sun has been bombarding its atmosphere-free surface with the isotope for billions of years and building it up in the grey lunar dust.

At Three Mile Island, the NRC screwed up in just about every way possible.

1) Early on, they came up with an idiotically brazen lie to avoid admitting that there had been any release. This lie, signed off by at least three of the Commissioners, was quickly exposed, but only after turning the event into national news.

2) The next day they claimed that, if the hydrogen bubble in the top of the Reactor Pressure Vessel expanded too far, it would interfere with the reactor cooling. At best, this showed gross incompetence. The B&W reactor pressure vessel (RPV) has a ring of check valves near the top of the RPV which would vent the hydrogen to the RPV annulus if the bubble got down that far.

3) The following day on the basis of a calculation that was off by a actor of 100 and a misinterpreted measurement, and with no attempt to confirm either with the NRC guys on site, NRC-DC called Pennsylvania Governor Thornburgh and recommended evacuation up to 10 miles downwind. Harold Denton, the NRC employee who made the decision later said: ``my sole objective was to minimize the radiation exposure to the public. I did not give any weight to whatever hardship evacuation might cause”.\cite{walker-2004}[p 126] Fortunately, Thornburgh who was talking to the people at the plant did not follow Denton’s recommendation.1

4) Later in the day, the NRC said that a meltdown was unlikely, but possible. The reactor had melted down two days earlier.

5) That evening, when everything was calming down, and the hydrogen bubble in the RPV was expertly but slowly being squeezed down by the reactor operators, an NRC employee, almost certainly Dr. Roger Mattson, Director of Systems Safety, went to an AP reporter demanding anonymity, and told him the bubble in the the RPV could explode within two days. This bombshell sent seasoned war correspondents and over 100,000 locals into panicked evacuation. The local Bishop was so sure his flock was about to be annihilated he declared General Absolution.

An explosion in the RPV was impossible due to the lack of oxygen, which was obvious to any competent nuclear engineer. A Chicago Tribune reporter, who was part of the ‘night of terror’, later correctly called it a “a hoax, a fumbling miscalculation by one of the NRC’s masters of technology,”

Figure 1. The 2.5 gigawatt Oconee plant in South Carolina. These three reactors were built for just over 350 million dollars between 1967 and 1974. That’s $1141 per kilowatt in 2024 dollars. They took about 6 years to build. Oconee can produce reliable, on-demand, zero pollution, very low CO2 electricity at less than 3 cents/kWh in today’s money. Oconee’s average capacity factor over the last 5 years was 98.2%. All three of these reactors have been licensed into the 2050’s, a gift from the Greatest Generation. Oconee and its cooling pond Lake Keowee have turned a depressed part of western South Carolina into a second home and tourist magnet.

Nuclear power in the West is a disastrously expensive mess. Table 1 shows where we are. Current builds have capital costs that are more than ten times higher than Oconee and her sisters. Only the wealthiest nations can afford these kind of costs, and then only sporadically. The construction times are such that there is no way nuclear can put a dent in global warming, or anything else. And it keeps getting worse. If this is the way things must be, nuclear power is a dead end, and rightly so. //

Yet in 2015, the German utility RWE commissioned their Eemshaven plant in the northeast corner of Holland at a cost of 2.2 billion euros. This is a little under $1500/kW for a 2 by 800 MW plant, or just under $2000/kW in 2024 dollars. This is for the latest and greatest ultra-super-critical plant meeting stringent EU pollution limits, sited in one of the most expensive places to build on the planet. The rule of thumb is $500/kW for the turbine hall and switchgear. The rest is fuel handling, the boiler, and pollution control. //

Figure 4. Fuel for 1 GW plant for one day. The coal plant’s fuel requires a 70 car train. The nuclear plant’s fuel fits in a two gallon jug. Newcastle 6700 is a good coal. Most coal’s are worse. //

A 1 GW nuclear, Figure 5, plant will burn about 82 kg’s of fuel per day, producing the same amount of solid waste. That’s about 100,000 times less than a coal plant. The coal yard and the coal receiving terminal disappear, as do the dryers and pulverizers. The nuke’s Fission Island volume will be smaller than the coal plant’s boiler. The turbine hall will be slightly larger. There will no stack gas handling equipment, no massive Forced Draft and Induced Draft fans, no SCR, no baghouses, no scrubbers, no massive stack. The ash landfill and slurry pond will be replaced by less than an acre of 5.9m(19 ft) high by 3.5m(11 ft) diameter casks. The nuclear plant should be cheaper to build with far cheaper fuel costs. //

Figure 15. Coal should be easy to beat

The reason why it is not is a tragically misdirected, autocratic regulatory system. We give an omnipotent regulator final approval of any nuclear power plant, and judge him on his ability to prevent a release of radiation. He gets no credit for the cheap, pollution-free, CO2-free, on-demand, power generated by a successful plant, nor the avoided mortality and morbidity that would have resulted if the plant had not been built. But he owns any problems. The regulator responds accordingly; and, since he has the final say, it’s his incentives, not society’s, that determines what happens. NRC Chairman Hendrie put it succinctly “The NRC’s responsibility is [nuclear] safety without regard to economic and social costs.” [Joseph Hendrie, NRC Chairman, 1979] The NRC’s definition of nuclear safety is preventing a release.

Figure 16. Hinkley Point tombstone.
No. Human welfare is our overriding priority.

This auto-genocidal myopia produces technical stagnation, a demoralized workforce, lack of competition, and shoddy quality. The end result is nuclear power that costs five or more times what it should-cost and build times that are three or more times longer than they need be. This in turn means nuclear is replaced by far more harmful technologies. It means nuclear can never be cheaper than the competition, which means humanity is far poorer than it could be. The greatest health hazard of all is poverty.

A blogger, Destin, talked TVA into letting him film the refueling process at Browns Ferry in Alabama. Browns Ferry is a three unit boiling water reactor plant. The design is essentially the same as the reactors at Fukushima. The hour and 45 minute video is overly long; and Destin’s narration can be a little grating at times; but overall he does a great job. It’s worth your time.

We also get a pretty good feeling for the plant’s safety culture. //

much of the video is taken up by Destin’s going through various check points, each manned by 3 or 4 people sitting around watching screens. While there are scores of people on the refueling floor, only a handful seem to be actually doing something to the plant. The actual shifting of the fuel bundles is done by a three person team, and is largely automated. At one point, a lady berates Destin’s guide who outranks her for letting Destin walk down a stairs facing forward. The stairs were narrower and steeper than normal. The rule is you have to treat it like a ladder.

Destin is told not to step on the floor drains. The problem is the moisture might contaminate his shoes, and set off alarms. The radiation in the drain is not from the plant. It’s normal background, naturally occurring radon and daughters. Nuclear plants don’t produce radon. On the way out, Destin’s camera fails to clear a check. So they disassemble the camera and put each piece into the detector separately, to allow the pieces out of the plant. Once again the source is background radon. //

On a positive note, TVA should be congratulated for allowing this visit. It should be commonplace. If I were king of the world, I’d have a glassed in viewing gallery, high in every reactor’s refueling space. During outages, I would invite everybody to walk through and get a look at what’s going on. Most of the people will come out as enthusiastic about nuclear as Destin.

The second 1974 Power Engineering article that Nick Touran has uncovered is Senior Editor Olds’ discussion of the massive jumps in power plant capital costs between 1965 and 1974 Power Plant Capital Costs Going Out of Sight.

The AEC required plant owners to report their estimate of the capital cost of any nuclear plants under construction, and update those estimates annually. Olds’ article is largely based on that data. All his dollar figures are in nominal dollars, the dollar of that year.

Figure 2. USA fossil plant costs bottomed out in 1966.

The paper is graced by a number of hand drawn, beautifully lettered graphics. Figure 2 shows that prior to 1967 fossil plant capital costs were falling reaching a low of $100/kW in nominal dollars in 1966. But in 1967, the cost jumped nearly 20% to $118. Unfortunately, Old does not take the fossil figures any further forward. But if he did he would see that 20% per year escalation continue unabated through 1974, Figure 3. //

Thanks to nuclear’s factor of 100,000 advantage in energy density over fossil, a technology that did not exist 15 years earlier, was working its way down a steep learning curve, and in 1967 was fully competitive with coal, when coal was as cheap as it ever was. Nuclear was insulated from both oil price and fossil pollution regulation.

But in 1967, a new omnipotent player emerged. In 1954, Congress had given the AEC complete and unfettered control over nuclear, both nuclear weapons and nuclear power. As Truman put it, atom power was “too important to be made the subject of profiteering”. The AEC had to both implement Mutually Assured Destruction, and promote and regulate nuclear power. The first responsibility included making sure everybody was petrified of the bomb.

Currently, by far the best Free World reactor is the Korean APR1400. The Korean’s can build an APR1400 for less than $3000/kW in Korea and have built four in the UAE for around $4500/kW. The APR1400 was our best, maybe only, hope for leading Western nuclear out of a prohibitively expensive regulatory morass.

The APR1400 is based on the Combustion Engineering (CE) System 80+ design, the best of the American PWR’s. In 1997, Kepco licensed that design. The Koreans demanded and got a Total Technology Transfer Agreement. No strings attached. They could use the IP anyway they wanted. CE’s back was against the wall. The tort lawyers had embroiled CE in an asbestos suit and they were going bankrupt. The cash from the Koreans kept CE alive for another couple of years. In 2000, Westinghouse acquired CE and became the licensor.

Westinghouse’s offering is the AP1000. The AP1000 is a cramped, nearly unmaintainable reactor which will cost you somewhere around $15,000/kW. Westinghouse knows it can’t compete with the APR1400. So Westinghouse has colluded with the DOE to prevent the Koreans from exporting the APR1400 from Korea. Westinghouse may have lousy engineers but they’ve got great lawyers.

On Wednesday, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it had issued its first construction approval in nearly a decade. The approval will allow work to begin on a site in Kemmerer, Wyoming, by a company called TerraPower. That company is most widely recognized as being financially backed by Bill Gates, but it’s attempting to build a radically new reactor, one that is sodium-cooled and incorporates energy storage as part of its design.

This doesn’t necessarily mean it will gain approval to operate the reactor, but it’s a critical step for the company.

The TerraPower design, which it calls Natrium and has been developed jointly with GE Hitachi, has several novel features. Probably the most notable of these is the use of liquid sodium for cooling and heat transfer. This allows the primary coolant to circulate at far lower pressure, avoiding any of the challenges posed by the high-pressure water or steam used in water-cooled reactors. But it carries the risk that sodium is highly reactive when exposed to air or water. Natrium is also a fast-neutron reactor, which could allow it to consume some isotopes that would otherwise end up as radioactive waste in more traditional reactor designs.

The reactor is also relatively small compared to most current nuclear plants (345 megawatts versus roughly 1 gigawatt), and incorporates energy storage. Rather than using the heat extracted by the sodium to boil water, the plant will put the heat into a salt-based storage material that can either be used to generate electricity or stored for later use. This will allow the plant to operate around renewable power, which would otherwise undercut it on price. The storage system will also allow it to temporarily output up to 500 MW of electricity. //

1Zach1 Ars Praefectus
8y
3,745
Subscriptor
bumppo said:
It sounds like a mechanism to avoid selling power during the point in the day that solar has driven the price down (potentially into negative territory), while preserving the ability to sell most of that power later.

It would be interesting to know how long the storage is designed to sustain that elevated, up-to-500 MW output.
Here are their plans detailed https://www.terrapower.com/downloads/Natrium-Technology.pdf

Power Output – EnergyStorage System100-500 MWe+ for 5.5+ hours, power ramping at 10% per minute